To the Editor:

Ed Morris’s recent letter to this newspaper criticized a letter I had written to The Franklin Press regarding a front page article they published. That article used information from a report titled “The Economic and Employment Costs of Not Expanding Medicaid in North Carolina: A County-Level Analysis” written by a George Washington University (GWU) professor.

It forecast an economic boom for N.C. if N.C. would add an estimated 500,000 N.C. residents to Medicaid under ObamaCare. After reading the report, I felt that article citing the report was opinion, not news, and should have been on that paper’s opinion page.

Morris complained I can’t separate fact from opinion. He apparently believes everything in the report is a fact and challenged me to “report to readers of this newspaper the precise, actual factual information that is wrong in the study…”

That’s a tough challenge since there is very little factual information in the report! Simple things like how many people will use expanded Medicaid, or how much N.C. will receive in federal Medicaid reimbursements are estimates, projections or forecasts, not facts.

Nearly every statement, starting on the first page of the report, is an estimate. The words “estimate,” “estimates,” and “estimated” appear 102 times in the poorly written report, but not everywhere they should have appeared. The “Executive Summary” didn’t even state that the REMI economic model generated the reported estimates.

It was not until page 29 in the “Appendix: Methods and Data Sources” that the report stated “The estimates in this report are based on multiple sources of information and a widely-used regional economic model [REMI] to estimate the economic and employment effects of Medicaid expansion.”

Consider the REMI economic model. It is based on flawed Keynesian economic theory that every dollar spent by government generates a multi-dollar economic impact. The same theory that didn’t work with the nearly $1 trillion Obama “stimulus” program.

This report, and Keynesian theory, ignores that every dollar government spends has been taken out of a taxpayer’s pocket, or added to the national debt, and has a negative economic impact when taken. This is “economic redistribution” at work.

Projections from REMI and other economic models are rarely checked for accuracy. The Congressional Budget Office’s complex economic model projections can be checked. Their short- and long-term forecasts show they are rarely accurate. REMI’s much simpler model should be expected to perform worse.

In January 2013, the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services received a report, “A Contrast: Modeling the Macroeconomic Impact of ‘Medicaid Expansion’ in North Carolina,” they had contracted for from the REMI corporation. This corporation programs the REMI economic model and is the true REMI expert. 

The economic estimates from the GMU report are from 80-100 percent higher than the HHS report. The estimates from the same model aren’t reproducible.

Vic Drummond

Franklin